Overview:

Seán mac Cann is a commercial lawyer who qualified with a 50-partner City law firm in London.  He has 20+ years’ experience of drafting, negotiating, and closing land, machinery-supply, construction and operational (generally FIDIC or MF/1), shareholder and joint venture agreements across wind, solar, tidal, waste-treatment and AD/CHP projects throughout Europe, South Africa and North America.

He is a former U.K. High Court corporate litigator who was part of a two-lawyer team advising an African government on a land and maritime boundary dispute at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.  He has senior private practice and in-house experience of large-scale onshore and offshore wind, tidal and solar projects (Airtricity Holdings Limited, Open Hydro Limited and Mainstream Renewable Power Limited) and has previous in-house experience of the offshore oil industry (Shell U.K. Limited).  He has senior in-house experience of global IP enforcement in a branded PLC (Burberry PLC).  He was co-founder and legal adviser to an innovative EDI, cloud and mobile security and authentication software company (Vordel Limited – acquired in 2012 by Axway PLC).  He is English-qualified (1995) and is also admitted in Northern Ireland and in Ireland.

Chronology:

  • Empower – Co-founder & CLO – global renewable developer, active in Northern European and African markets
  • Corporate law firm, Belfast (Carson McDowell) – Solicitor, Senior Associate (commercial: wind, biomass, automotive; UK, Irish and Indian clients)
  • Mainstream (global wind developer) – GC (first counsel)   
  • OpenHydro (R&D tidal developer; Ireland & Canada) – Head of Legal   
  • Airtricity (global wind developer) – GC (first counsel)   
  • Vordel (EDI software, Ireland and US – Co-founder & GC; global CPD-standard presenting on contractual implications of Diffie-Hellmann key exchanges; contributed legal chapter to Web Services Security, a technical IT practitioner’s manual published in the U.S. by McGraw Hill academic publishers.)
  • ComReg (telecoms regulator, Ireland) – Solicitor (judicial reviews, cross-subsidisation)
  • Corporate law firm, Dublin – Solicitor (commercial, non-contentious; occasional lecturer in commercial law at the Irish Law Society)
  • Burberry PLC, London – Solicitor (sole responsibility for legal management of commercial agents, and soft IP enforcement, across 26 territories)
  • Shell, London – Solicitor (upstream and downstream)
  • City law firm, London – Solicitor (mostly contentious, High Court, global clients, global fraud cases (e.g., Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)), inter-state boundary dispute and some non-contentious work, e.g., working closely with the CBI on coalmines privatisation)  

Qualifications:

  • Solicitor in England & Wales (admitted 1995); in Ireland (1998) and in Northern Ireland (2013)
  • Law Society Final Examinations (LSF), College of Law, York (1991 – 1992)